Blog Posts

As a few snark hunters have noted with glee in comments to posts on this page, I've been suspended from the practice of law for six months. So I am to pulling this blog page, steeped, as it is, in reference to my lawyerly days. (Or, I should say, I've asked my webmaster to pull this page; I am not...

I’ll never forget the first time I heard of blogging. Mike Cernovich called. I think he was a law student at Pepperdine at the time. Did I want to join him on a blog site he had created called Crime and Federalism? The year was 2005.
“What’s a...

Richard Kopf, a U.S. District Court judge in Nebraska, writes a blog. The other day, he vented about the Supreme Court's recent decision in Hobby Lobby, the decision that extended the fiction of corporate personhood to the point of now offering the law's protection to "corporate" beliefs. The...

Blame the Internet gods, or, at the very least, my webmaster.
In an effort to accomodate the complaints of several readers who had difficulty posting comments to this page, I requested yesterday that someone fix the settings in the comments section. They did. But at various points last night,...

I detoxed on Scott Greenfield and Simple Justice a year or so ago, and have had few occasions since to go back to his page. But when I read this morning that he was unplugging his keyboard, I was surprised. I will miss him now that he has gone. Indeed, I suspect he will be back soon enough, perhaps...

The Sunday New York Times nailed what’s wrong with legal education in this country: The legal academy educates lawyers by long exposure to professors who don’t practice law. The chattering class teaches theory, not practice. Mere practitioners are scorned. We have nothing to teach. We...

Welcome: I'm the "deep and progressive thinker" you linked to. I also have a pony tail. And, what's worst of all, I think Rakofsky's claims are pretty interesting. But then again, I turned my card in to the guildmasters on the blawgosphere long ago.
Joseph Rakofsky made a little money this...

Another lost weekend is behind me. It was spent fussing over a manuscript, reading the same words for the umpteenth time, trying to force the garbage out of my prose, and hoping to catch errors before they see the light of day in the form of a book. It strikes me now, and with fury, that there is a...

The first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to two men in 1901: Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, and an international pacifist named Frederic Passy. The Nobel committee ought to award the prize to Wikileaks. It would reward sunshine in government, and be a fitting acknowledgement of...

The first volume of Mark Twain's much-anticipated autobiography arrived the other day. At 700-plus pages, there is a telephone directory-like feel to it. It was the work of the second half of the author's life. He conceived it as an experiment, trying to determine whether he could be completely...